How Do You Like Your In-Laws?

“But Ruth replied, ‘Don’t urge me to leave you or to turn back from you. Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the Lord deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me’”
(Ruth 1:16, 17 NIV).

Being a wife gives us many interesting experiences. One of them is the opportunity to be a daughter-in-law.

Your mother-in-law is the woman whom your husband probably loves more than anyone else in the world except you. Sometimes, it seems, nothing you do will completely please her.

When interacting with a mother-in-law, it is tempting to get hurt, to quit trying and to give up.

If you are feeling this way, I challenge you to read a very short book in the Bible, The Book of Ruth. It is an exciting love story of a beautiful mother-in-law and widowed daughter-in-law relationship. I won’t tell you everything the story involves—you should read it for yourself—but I will tell you that God honored Ruth for the way she treated her mother-in-law. He gave her a new husband and children and she became one of the great-great-grandmothers of Christ.

Love your mother-in-law. After all, you have one big thing in common. You both love the same man.

Kimberly Snider is a missionary to the Philippines.

From “Moments for Moms,” a free email subscription.
Copyright (c) 2005 Women’s Ministries of the Assemblies of God.
http://www.ag.org/womensministries

 

Maxim of the Moment

The bankrupt man is the man who has lost his enthusiasm. - H.W. Arnold